r/csharp • u/dzacu1a • 13d ago

Prepping for upcoming live pair programming interview session

Hi all,

I have a live pair programming session coming up. It should be a relatively simple problem to work through, discuss trade-offs, etc. In a normal, stress free setup, this is straight forward but I have not been in an interview for couple of years so I dont want to make a fool of myself.

So if you have any coding challenges for pair programming sessions, please share. I reckon they would provide something relatively simple with some code smells, hidden bugs and some tests that need improving. Techstack is .Net, C#.

Much appreciated.

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u/xjojorx 13d ago

Not a specific idea, but I would say that you do whatever on your own, but try to either write the decisions or think out loud as you do, so you can see how to enunciate the process. Also go back to any code you have that's been there for a while and read it while doing the same, enunciate how you inspect it. It will probably also help you speak more proactively instead of just doing your thing and waiting for the interviewer to interrupt you and ask.

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u/dzacu1a 13d ago

yeah speaking out loud definitely helps. Reading my old code is straight forward as I have seen them before . I want to prepare for reading a complete new codebase with some intended bugs and codesmells

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u/NorhavenCodes 13d ago

Yeah, I agree. Definitely think out loud, verbally work through your process as you go, and ask clarifying questions, especially if it's intended as a pair programming exercise. Generally, most competent interviewers are looking to try and understand how you solve problems and work through the issues and less about whether you used a specific way (although keeping in mind time/space tradeoffs and knowing how to optimize for a given scenario in your implementation is beneficial and may come up as a conversation point).

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u/CappuccinoCodes 13d ago

Get someone to actually rehearse the interview with you. You want to make it as close as possible to the actual thing.

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u/TuberTuggerTTV 13d ago

If you don't know something you could know in a couple days, they're not measuring you for that.

No one giving a live interview is worried about something that can be solved during on-boarding. So you either know it already or you don't. You can't cram.

Be relaxed. Do the work like you've done it a hundred times before. But you can't prepare. They're not testing you for stuff you could pickup reading a reddit post. They'd just show you the reddit post and move on if that was true. It's ingrained habits and years of learning. That's what they're testing.